A Swissinfo.ch video[1] from 2019, “Why is plastic so hard to recycle?”, concludes: “We’re in 2019 and plastic waste management still seems to be a riddle in Switzerland.” Now, in 2026, the riddle still seems unsolved not only in Switzerland but also in the rest of the world. Indeed, plastics recycling is a very complex challenge, involving not only an effective collection system, but also energy recovery through incineration and material reprocessing.
Nevertheless, true riddles can be solved by thinking like a detective: looking past the “disguise” of the story to find the simple truth underneath and place it in the right context. Solving a riddle requires lateral thinking, breaking the discourse into smaller, manageable parts, and analyzing every word for metaphorical, double, or literal meanings. It may also require ruling out impossible scenarios and, if necessary, reversing the order of the clues.
Socio-economics
One truth in the plastics recycling riddle relates to the socio-economic drivers[2]. These are the underlying societal and financial forces that influence how plastics are perceived, managed, processed, and, after use, reintroduced into the economy. These drivers range from high-level government policies to company interests and individual household behaviors.
The predominant driver, however, concerns whether recycling is a viable business or a financial burden. Recycling initiatives need to be cost-competitive to remain sustainable in the long term. As most plastics are fossil-fuel-based, subsidies or low oil prices can mean that recycled materials struggle to compete with virgin plastics or cheap imports.
For plastics converters, however, assuming quality, safety, and performance specifications are met, using recycled plastics may lead to operational savings through a reduced environmental footprint and lower CO₂ taxation. Likewise, municipalities and companies may be more willing to divert waste toward recycling considering increasing disposal fees and related legislation.
Recycling initiatives are also a significant source of employment through collection, sorting, and processing. In many developing regions, waste pickers and small dealers are the hidden engine of recycling, contributing substantially to the recovery of global plastic waste, estimated to be as much as 60%.[3]
Beyond the economic benefits of job creation, employment also has important social functions: it gives people a sense of purpose and provides income. Higher income has been shown to encourage higher educational attainment and greater willingness to participate in recycling programs[4]. Educational initiatives and growing environmental awareness about plastic pollution have also fostered more positive attitudes toward recycling. This is reflected in increasing consumer demand for sustainable packaging, which in turn pushes brands to commit to high recycled-content targets.
However, social participation depends heavily on how easy recycling is. Measures that reward returns, as well as the availability of public collection schemes and accessible bins, often outweigh environmental knowledge as drivers of recycling behavior. Garrett Hardin’s paper, “The Tragedy of the Commons”[5], illustrates how individuals tend to act in their own self-interest, leading to the degradation and depletion of shared resources. To prevent such wasteful behavior, policymakers and governments use legal frameworks to drive a socioeconomic shift toward circularity and recycling.
Common policy tools include bans and taxes, consumer deposits, recycled-content mandates, and extended producer responsibility schemes, where the latter shifts the financial and physical responsibility for a product’s end of life from taxpayers to producers and aims to stimulate better product design. However, people’s acceptance of such legislation is usually based on broad support for the general concept, while resistance often emerges when the specific impacts become clear. Self-interest, whether at the individual or company level, means acceptance is highly dependent on personal cost, income, convenience, restrictions on freedom, perceived fairness, and political trust. Accordingly, pull measures such as subsidies, information campaigns, and social engagement initiatives generally receive higher acceptance than push measures such as additional taxes, bans, and stricter regulation.
Value Chains
The second truth concerns cooperation along the value chain. A value chain is an economic term describing the commercial interactions among individuals and companies as they work to add value to a product or service. The fate of each participant in a value chain depends strongly on the behavior and interests of all the others, including consumers, as well as on the broader (geo)political context.
For plastics, the value chain begins with the choice of feedstock used to synthesize the polymer, which may be fossil-based or non-fossil-based. This choice determines the overall economics of the value chain and ultimately how easy or difficult the plastics will be to recover and recycle, either as material or as chemical feedstock. The conversion of synthesized plastics into a wide range of diverse products is driven by actual or anticipated market demand. These products meet increasingly specific functional needs and preferences, bringing both real and perceived benefits such as food safety, lightweighting, low cost, durability, fashion, branding, convenience, and personalization.
Typically, individual plastics are combined with other plastics and additives to meet market requirements, with little consideration given to design for recycling. Only on 18 July 2024 did the EU-27 Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (EU) 2024/1781[6] enter into force, establishing specific standards to improve environmental performance across the full life cycle of nearly all physical goods, many of which contain plastics. It was complemented by the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation (EU) 2025/40[7], which entered into force on 11 February 2025. Although not specific to plastics, it affects nearly 40% of plastics used in packaging systems.
The most critical part of the value chain, however, is what happens to post-use plastics and plastic-containing goods, and whether they are ultimately collected as recyclable feedstock. This is known as the “circularity gap”[8] and refers to the difference between the quantity of plastics produced and used and the amount that is ultimately recovered. For consumer goods, this remains a significant challenge. Everyone must ensure that a purchased good, post-use, enters the appropriate and effective public or private collection system, where one exists. Globally, the maturity and efficiency of such systems vary significantly. Even within the EU-27, despite established plastics collection and recycling targets, there are neither standardized collection methodologies nor common sorting processes, and no harmonized indirect or direct taxation or incentives for individuals, households, or enterprises.
Even when all goods are collected, the complexity of the material and additive mix, in myriad shapes and forms, creates a major challenge for handling and extraction. In a take-make-deliver-use-waste linear economy, where responsibility for goods is shifted from supplier to producer and ultimately to the public, there is little chance that the EU-27 Fit for 55 targets[9] will be achieved by 2030. Even well-intentioned legislative measures, which impose additional costs on all stakeholders, may become counterproductive, as the EU-27 has failed over the past 40 years to formulate and implement a clear and unified strategy for energy independence and critical materials partnerships that would enable the achievement of such ambitious targets. In addition, trust and collaboration among stakeholders across the value chain and across EU-27 borders are urgently needed, along with transparent information flows based on standardized data formats and shared circularity goals.
Science & Technology
The third truth concerns science and technology. The science of thermodynamics shows that it is impossible for any transformational process to recover 100% of energy or material. There are always losses, meaning that even with a perfect design enabling full product recycling, not all input additives and materials can be recovered. Some fractions will remain that cannot be reused and must be disposed of in some form, typically through incineration in the case of plastics. Nevertheless, over the years, many technologies have been developed to varying levels of maturity for converting collected plastic goods back into plastic materials, their building-block chemicals, oils that can be used to make building-block chemicals, or syngas i.e., mainly carbon monoxide and hydrogen. Remaining challenges include the economics of scaling, the integration of recycled products and chemicals into existing value chain operations, logistics, the quality and safety consistency of recyclates, and global competition. A persistent and critical challenge however is the complex often multi-material type composition of post-use plastics goods. It introduces variability and difficulties for collecting sufficiently uniform feedstock. It implies and defines the choice of a preferred recycling technology adding an additional challenge to the economics of recycling.
Circularity
The fourth truth concerns the concept of circularity. Frameworks such as the “Cradle to Cradle model” proposed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart[10], the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s “Butterfly Model”, in which the bio cycle and technical cycle form the “wings of a butterfly”[11], and Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Model”[12] each present idealized pathways toward a circular economy. Their common aim is to decouple economic growth from the continual extraction and depletion of finite resources, thereby avoiding the gradual but irreversible degradation of the biosphere and human habitats. These models and their variants rest on a strategic intention to mimic natural processes. At the same time, they also reflect a form of human exceptionalism: the assumption of human supremacy, the belief in control over nature, and the implied entitlement to commodify the Earth and other species solely for human benefit[13].
However, the functioning of the biosphere is governed by the laws of nature, not by human ambition. In this context, these models offer valuable guidance, but they are neither a detailed roadmap nor a complete solution to climate change and irreversible habitat loss. Recycling efforts, including reduce, reuse, repair, rebuild, refurbish, refinish, resell, and compost, certainly help slow the consumption of virgin feedstock and reduce anthropogenic pressure on the biosphere. Yet recycling brings a cost and is a complex challenge. Certainly, it is a self-created problem, which suggests that it must be addressed by those who created it. At the same time, the best way to deal with complex problems is often to avoid creating them in the first place. Band-aid solutions or partial fixes may produce unintended consequences and can make the problem harder to resolve. For example, incinerating carbon-based material that was previously buried as fossil fuel releases greenhouse gases and creates the additional challenge of capturing and managing them. Moreover, transforming societal systems that were developed by millions of people over several centuries cannot realistically be undone within a few decades while preserving current living standards.
The plastics recycling issue, like the recycling of many other materials, is a consequence of an economic system focused primarily on growth and driven largely by short-term consumerism. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and GDP per capita are the main indicators of economic growth. They track monetary transactions while GDP per capita is often used as a proxy for living standards. However, these measures overlook the long-term foundations of a sustainable society. The extraction and sale of natural resources are counted as income, while the associated environmental degradation is ignored. Meanwhile, the negative consequences for instance for health and quality of life are often captured only indirectly, through increased spending on for example cancer treatment, home security, defence, humanitarian aid, or welfare.
The Challenge
To truly solve the recycling riddle, it must be placed within the broader context of creating a sustainable society that operates in harmony with the natural processes governing the biosphere. Effective and efficient recycling can only be achieved if all participants in the value chain are cooperating, understand each other’s challenges and act together. This requires a mindset change and a clear strategy, a practical roadmap, and meaningful action plans for both the individuals and organizations involved. The EU-27 Green Deal[14] strategy includes more than 150 initiatives and dozens of specific legislative acts aimed at making the EU-27 climate neutral by 2050. However, these policies are mostly seen as a costly burden and remain far removed from everyday life while largely overlook a fundamental aspect of human motivation: individuals are primarily guided by their own interests. This reality has led economists, politicians, legislators, business leaders, engineers, and many others to design systems based on incentives, rewards, and penalties to achieve desired outcomes[15]. Yet most such measures tend to generate resistance rather than commitment.
Encouraging individual participation in collective action requires overcoming barriers to cooperation and ensuring that people are acknowledged and rewarded for constructive contributions by peers, family, communities, and legislative institutions. Although no one can see CO2 or fine particulate matter, everyone can see the enormous amount of plastic and cardboard packaging, casually discarded cigarette butts, paper coffee cups, plastic and glass bottles, and other waste that accumulates daily in streets and even in the most remote places on Earth. Therefore, all solutions begin on a small scale when addressing a complex problem, and every individual contribution matters. Stop shifting the burden to others. Let us not continue to make the recycling riddle someone else’s responsibility because everyone is responsible and can contribute.
But keep in mind that recycling is neither a magic wand nor a free lunch that will lead societies into a sustainable wonderland while continuing with business as usual. The recycling process comes with a socio-economic cost and may reduce the feedstock resourcing pressure for some time but will not lead to a circular society or fix the climate change threat in the long run.
References
[1] https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/nouvo_why-is-plastic-so-hard-to-recycle-/45348284?utm_campaign=teaser-in-article&utm_source=swissinfoch&utm_medium=display&utm_content=o
[2] Daoud, Omar Walid et al., The impact of socio-economic factors on recycling behavior and waste generations: Insights from a diverse university population in the UAE., Cleaner waste systems 11 (2025) 100266.
[4] Elelu, Dennis et al., Household income and it’s impact on education attainment of children: A case study., Metropolitan Journal of social and educational research, 3, 11 (2024): 290-304
[5] Hardin, Garrett. “The Tragedy of the Commons.” Science 162 (1968): 1243–1248.
[6] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2024/1781/oj/eng
[7] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2025/40/oj/eng
[8] https://www.circularity-gap.world/about
[9] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/fit-for-55/
[10] McDonough, William and Braungart, Michael. Cradle to cradle. Remaking the way we make things. New York, NY: North Point Press, 2002.
[11] https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/
[12] Raworth, Kate, Doughnut economics.White River Junction (VR) : Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.
[13] Webb, Christine, The arrogant ape. Penguin Random House, New York, NY, 2025.
[14] https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/european-green-deal/#:~:text=What%20is%20the%20European%20Green,22/07/2024
[15] Yochai Benkler, The penguin, and the leviathan. The triumph of cooperation over self-interest., Crown Business, New York (NY) USA, 2011.
